Learning to use prepositions: a case study

The current study documented one child's earliest use of prepositions during her second year of life. The spatial oppositions up-down, on-off, in—out and over—under were first to be learned. These words were all used initially in non-prepositional senses (mostly as holophrastic, verb-like requests for activities) prior to prepositional usage. They were seldom omitted or misused. The prepositions with, by, to, for, at and of were learned later. Four of these were used to express at least two distinct case relationships, and some case relationships (instrumental and dative) were indicated by more than one of these words. These later learned prepositions were not used by adults or learned by the child as holophrases, but rather they were acquired as distinct lexical items by means of analytic learning strategies that employed some form of ‘extraction’ from adult phrases. These words were omitted and misused much more often than the spatial oppositions. Differences in the acquisition pattern of these two groups of prepositions were attributed to linguistic rather than to cognitive factors.